In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

He didn't wake when the stewardess told everyone to adjust their seats,
so Penny did it for him and he still didn't wake up. The guy must've
been up for days.
She nudged him, "We're here, mister sleepyhead."
He started, looked around in a panic, then seeing her he smiled
and rubbed his face as if waking from a bad dream.
Inside the terminal the first thing she noticed was the smoke.
Cigarettes. Everywhere, thin, nervous people flicked ash, talked on cell
phones, dragged wheelie suitcases across the slick butt strewn floor. Up
ahead, past a cluster of small navy blue uniformed customs officers, an
entire sub Saharan nation, swathed in bright flowing robes, each group
guarding mammoth cardboard crates of household electronics, waited
to board a plane for Dakar.
He was already on his cell now as they skimmed ahead on the
undulating mechanized walkway. At the end of the creosote covered
tunnel a crowd of limo drivers was gathered, each holding up a magic
marker sign, but no placards had their names on them.
"The car is late. We wait outside."
They went through the invisible automatic doors. The doors
opened on a narrow sidewalk crammed full of super size Americans
and their bulging suitcases. A cold steady drizzle prickled her face.
Finding a clear spot of sidewalk a few feet away from the herd, they
looked up the drive for the car, and, as if on cue a black Mercedes
skidded up, they slid into the back seat with their bags and sped away
swerving through the maze of airport roads. The sky outside the
window hung lower and darker than any in Penny's memory.
Clean trucks and tiny new cars zipped through the rain along a
backdrop of corrugated steel fences in an orderly procession like ants
on a trail.
Alessandro gabbed away in rapid French. He'd been on the
phone since touchdown, scrolling nervously through his menu. The car
dipped into a tunnel. Through the tungsten glow of the tunnel, out of
touch with his phone line, he watched her. She stared right back. He
was eerily perfect in the pink glow.
The tunnel surfaced along the river on a wide street and it
wasn't until they stopped at a light in front of the Pont Neuf and she
saw the dark river flowing under the bridge and the cathedral behind it
that she realized they were actually in Paris.
The doors hissed open to a rain-slick sidewalk. Alessandro
thanked Yusef, the driver then got out, extending his hand to Penny.
32